16:10 is fine for games? Even say.. older games from the late nineties?
I need a monitor that can actually run -at- those lower resolutions, 640x480 or god forbid, even 320x240 in some cases (MCGA!) and I need it to not look like crap. CRTs work very well, but LCDs.. well, it's spotty.
Silver hand, the realm I play on, is #2 on the population list, and several days ago was subject to the dreaded queue. It took me 63 minutes to log in, and some of my friend even longer. Just because you haven't been hit with the problem doesn't mean it didn't exist...
I would say Diablo and Diablo II don't count, no. Yes, battle.net had a large number of users, but there weren't a large number of users in one world. They were individual instances limited to 8 players, and that's what really distinguishes a "game played online" from a Massively Multiplayer Online RPG. 8 players isn't what I'd call "massive." The only real differences between WoW and DiabloII's method of world/instance creation are that 1) WoW is persistant - DiabloII games disappear completely when the last player exits, and 2) each instance in WoW handles many more users at once (20,000+ sometimes, as opposed to 8).
I was under the impression that much of the reason it didn't do well was bad timing. Its release was overshadowed by the releases of The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
I'm sure that a terrible plot, terrible characters, awful personal scenes (Picard off-roading, Riker getting into his stupid one-on-one fight, the list goes on), moronic dialog.. I'm sure none of that had anything to do with its box office failure.
Was Wrath of Khan awesome? Yes, but I'd rather watch Wrath of Khan again than a very pale retread.
Unfortunately the "manage it yourself, Linux is free" argument is in direct conflict with the "Linux is a great alternative to MS's and Sun's stuff," yet often these are two ideas that are in direct conflict with one another. When an operating system/kernel is being pushed as being enterprise quality as much as Linux has in the last few years, then it's not unreasonable to expect a certain level of quality from the maintainers, and "oh, it's free, you should be grateful" is not an excuse when security flaws are ignored.
Did Red Hat, SuSe, Debian et all come out with a patched kernel for this even when Linus didn't? If not.. why not, I wonder? If the kernel maintainers don't settle it, then the distribution maintainers ought to pick up the slack with patches.
Sorry, I'll probably annoy the pinguinistas, but taking a Linux system as root online back then, meant you had a script kiddie logged in withing hours at most. _And_ most distros made the same MS mistake of installing and starting every possible service by default, and no firewall either. I know my SuSE systems got Apache, MySQL and God knows what else if I didn't uncheck those at install time.
When I was first starting out with Slackware ('94 and '95) I remember by default it installed a few no-password test accounts. I think they may even have been root-level UID 0 accounts too.
I don't think you understand Local Vulnerabities, local vulnerability doesn't mean they can gain access to a "local account" it means they REQUIRE one.
If one user compromises the system, then all users should be considered compromised. He mentioned university shell access because it's an example of a many-user system still used today where one has an account on the box but the box doesn't belong to him.
The only threat here is out of control feds, demonstrating their power. Trying to perceive a laser pointer as a threat to aircraft.
Shining a laser into the cockpit of an aircraft is trying to bring down the aircraft. There is no other reason for doing it.
creating a mountain out of a mole hill, with a total lack of understanding about laser pointers, beam diameter or output - not to mention you have to be actually looking directly at the beam i.e. even at the at furthest stretch of imagination the "terrorist" would have to be in direct line of sight - on the runway.
I suggest you read up a little more on this, it is not the harmless non-issue you're trying to make it out to be.
Valve used the source code leak as an excuse for their prolonged development process instead of fessing up to the fact that they did, infact, not plan properly.
And it's not like they have a history of crushing delays in the production pipeline. They're still hurting from it.. I think Doom3 stole some of their thunder, and it wouldn't have been nearly as popular if Half-Life hadn't been delayed by over a year.
When I was about 15, I drove my bicycle at high speed into a parked van because I was daydreaming and nearly broke my leg. It never would have happened if the van had been parked there. If the library had been closed, I wouldn't have been daydreaming in the first place, etc. The blame for my accident must therefore be shared among myself, the owner of the van, the library, the manufacturer of my bicycle, my parents, and the city.
Oh wait, no, that doesn't make any sense.
You're right, it doesn't make sense. Here's where the analogy breaks down: Was the van illegally parked in a hazardous place? (Ie, double-parked in a bike lane on a busy street). The library thing doesn't even come close to matching the situation mentioned by the original poster.
I hate the various laws covering IP recently, but the difference with your analogy is that these laws were passed to combat illegal activity.
I'm on the latest Firefox, on Linux and with all the Java crap disabled yet it managed to hijack my browser.
You may have disabled Java, but most likely you didn't have Javascript disabled, which is what that page used. It was tricky getting the preferences pane up and onto another desktop, but the instant that I disabled javascript, the hijinx stopped.
There is a known kernal bug in 2.4.20-6 that has symptoms along these lines, but Redhat never fixed it. Someone here showed me how to turn off swapping, whcih I did, and that seems to have resolved the problem. I swapped the backup server with the online server last night at 3AM which is a pretty dead time, and I've been watching it as the load came up today -- it's still fast as it should be, and there are zero signs of memory issues.
Hmmmm... if the newest of the 2.4.x kernels doesn't fix this problem for you, then I suggest sending mail to the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Even if they can't fix it directly (and there are still some people working on the 2.0.x from time to time, so improvements to 2.4.x shouldn't be too unlikely), they may still be able to offer more concrete suggestions and ideas for what could be going wrong.
Thanks for your comments; I very much appreciate yours, and those of the other helpful people who showed up in and amongst the weenies who claimed such a problem was impossible.
Yes well.. those of us with enough experience in the field know that nothing is impossible.;)
Game Tunnel presents their 2004 Independent Game of the Year awards.
Wouldn't Slashdot be so much better like that? Then we wouldn't have to skim the comments of some boob nitpicking the editors for trying to produce non-cardboard prose.
But that's not what the introduction is supposed to be for on Slashdot. It's supposed to tittilate and engage the reader, leap out and shout "this is for you!" whether it really is or not. It's marketing.
One possible way around this is if someone already has purchased the CD/DVD and wanted to download a copy so they could archive the original (because they have CD/DVD hardware that couldn't rip the original to disk). Of course, this idea has not been tested in court, and would probably be a protracted and expensive battle to fight.
Something very similar to this has been tested in court. Several years ago, mp3.com had a service to let you download mp3s of albums you owned.. ie, you put your CD into the drive and it verifies you have the album.. then you can download mp3s of the work. Well, at the end of the court fight, mp3.com lost a large judgement because even though the users of the service were downloading mp3s of albums they owned, mp3.com still did not have the legal authority to distribute the mp3 files. Only the copyright holder can have that legal authority.
So, if someone wanted to "download a copy so they could archive the original," the only ones legally allowed to give it to them would be the media companies, and don't expect that to happen anytime soon. While you might have the legal right to make a backup copy if you can, the media companies hate that "fair use" and are only going to make doing that as hard as they can.
1. hilight with mouse to copy selection 2. middle click target to paste to... (both buttons on a 2-button mouse)
Except of course when it does absolutely nothing, like it often does with, say, Firefox, Mozilla, and other GUI apps. Things seem to blow away the cut buffer so easily without any user interaction. So often it happens that I highlight something in an xterm, try to paste it in the address bar in firefox. Well. It doesn't paste. Try to paste it in another xterm, doesn't paste there either. The paste buffer is mysteriously empty. That's the sort of thing that people complain about when they mention cut&paste.
On these machines, about 80% was allocated to cache and buffers. Someone here showed me how to use swapon and swapoff; after turning swapoff, the system's web server and application startup performance immediately speeded up to levels that feel pretty much like fresh boot speeds. As of this morning, maybe ten or so hours after the change was made, about 70% is allocated to cache and buffers, and the machine is still acting snappy and clean. Other evidence, like window dragging coming back to a normal speed, are also evident. This is a back up, or failover, server, so it's not under a lot of stress; if it remains stable for a few days, I'll swap it with a live server and see how it fares.
It... almost sounds like a large process is eating up a lot of memory, forcing other processes out to swap, and then dying, leaving those processes in a swapped state.. then other processes used the disk to generate the cache. That's what the symptoms sound like, unless you really are hitting some obscure kernel bug somehow. It sounds really odd.
I do recommend trying the latest 2.4 kernels.
We've had this problem ever since RH9 came out
Aah, we upgraded straight from RedHat 7.1 (albeit a heavily modified and upgraded 7.1.. had XFree86 4.1, kernel 2.4.24) to Fedora Core 2.
I'm only familiar with RPM, not with debian's packaging format et all.
It complicates:
# the ability to understand what is on you computer
How? rpm -qa will tell me all the packages installed. There are various frontends that are nicer to deal with as well. When I look in/usr, everything is laid out in a way that (usually!) makes sense.
# the ability to control what is on your computer
That's very vague. Exactly what do you mean with "control?" I've found I've had far more control with a packaging system than I ever really wanted...
# the ability to remove what is on your computer
Use rpm -e pkgname
# the ability to free up space on your computer
See above.
# the ability to recognize things that shouldn't be on your computer (spyware, viruses, etc.)
Eh? Spyware/viruses usually aren't located in C:\Program Files\Viruses under Windows (the platform with spyware/virus problems).
# locating programs (e.g., no icon on desktop or entry in menu, but you know files are installed somewhere)
Use rpm -ql pkgname. Or look in/usr/bin, since every binary ought to be installed there. Or run locate programname.
# troubleshooting program problems (e.g., missing files, corrupt files)
Use rpm -V pkgname to check this sortof thing out.
Back in the day, I liked when Windows 3.1 apps were just unzipped to an app directory. You could move that directory around, zip it, unzip it after reformatting the disk.. but that was the last version to feature anything like this. With win95 came the practice of flinging files around the around the filesystem. Under Linux I at least have a reasonably easy way to determine exactly what package owns a file, or if the file is owned by no package at all.
This is... very unusual behavior, and not normally indicative of performance under Linux. We still have many workstations running 2.4.20 at my workplace and have not seen these sort of slowdown problems, and a few hundred machines still running 2.4.24 with no problem either. Some of which have been running in active use with intensive user applications for months. I suggest using 'free' to take a look at how much memory is being used, specifically the -/+ cache/buffers line. If there's a lot of memory allocated to cache and buffers when you're swapping, then I'm at a loss to explain what should be going on.:) Caching should be absolutely harmless. It should not slow your system down.
Audio is not terribly difficult to get working.. if all you do is plug a set of speakers to the line out of your video card. But under the amazingly user-hostile ALSA system, options like "allow AC3 passthrough" and "take all analog signals and send them to the digital out" for my SB Live! are notoriously difficult. The former problem was fixed by upgrading ALSA (apparently the SB Live support in the version included with the recent 2.6 kernels is BROKEN), the latter used to work and has stopped working for.. well, no reason really. That's how it goes with sound in Linux these days -- very easy to do very simple things, excruciatingly difficult to do non-simple things.
The college thing is meaningless. Bush went to university too. Look where that went.
Bush is smarter than you, me, and a majority of the people on slashdot. I detest the man, but playing into the dummy stereotype seriously misunderestimates him.
As for the SATs I don't know if that's true [I try not to think about them unless I'm ranting] but even if it's true it doesn't mean they're intelligent.
It usually does mean they're intelligent, though intelligence doesn't always translate into real-world success.
And on top of all that, fuck them [not literally that's a crime].
Not anymore!
millions of dollars per movie/appearance? Let's see how "shiny" they are when their annual income is say more inline with reality, say $50,000/yr or so.
Sour grapes. The Olson twins fill a demand that not that many others could, and that's why they get paid the large salary. That's why most people with large salaries get what they do, from football players to actors to CEOs, because the work they do is in a lucrative industry and requires special skills or talents (natural or developed) that few people have. It's simply another example of the laws of supply and demand. You may think the work they do is worthless, but a lot of other people don't and are willing to plunk their money down for them.
And given the success of the Olson twins' recent endeavors (and their "advancing age"), I'd say their salaries are about to plummit. The only asset they had was their cute youth.
Slashdot Mirror
Being serious and off-topic for a moment... but that's the problem with potential suiciders. Almost any communication medium is a danger.
I need a monitor that can actually run -at- those lower resolutions, 640x480 or god forbid, even 320x240 in some cases (MCGA!) and I need it to not look like crap. CRTs work very well, but LCDs.. well, it's spotty.
Silver hand, the realm I play on, is #2 on the population list, and several days ago was subject to the dreaded queue. It took me 63 minutes to log in, and some of my friend even longer. Just because you haven't been hit with the problem doesn't mean it didn't exist...
Incorrect. bnetd did nothing to facilitate piracy, it had the exact same level of security that setting up a TCP/IP under DiabloII had.
I'm sure that a terrible plot, terrible characters, awful personal scenes (Picard off-roading, Riker getting into his stupid one-on-one fight, the list goes on), moronic dialog.. I'm sure none of that had anything to do with its box office failure.
Was Wrath of Khan awesome? Yes, but I'd rather watch Wrath of Khan again than a very pale retread.
Did Red Hat, SuSe, Debian et all come out with a patched kernel for this even when Linus didn't? If not.. why not, I wonder? If the kernel maintainers don't settle it, then the distribution maintainers ought to pick up the slack with patches.
If it destroys all your processes, then yes that's close enough to be called a reboot.
When I was first starting out with Slackware ('94 and '95) I remember by default it installed a few no-password test accounts. I think they may even have been root-level UID 0 accounts too.
If one user compromises the system, then all users should be considered compromised. He mentioned university shell access because it's an example of a many-user system still used today where one has an account on the box but the box doesn't belong to him.
Shining a laser into the cockpit of an aircraft is trying to bring down the aircraft. There is no other reason for doing it.
creating a mountain out of a mole hill, with a total lack of understanding about laser pointers, beam diameter or output - not to mention you have to be actually looking directly at the beam i.e. even at the at furthest stretch of imagination the "terrorist" would have to be in direct line of sight - on the runway.
I suggest you read up a little more on this, it is not the harmless non-issue you're trying to make it out to be.
And it's not like they have a history of crushing delays in the production pipeline. They're still hurting from it.. I think Doom3 stole some of their thunder, and it wouldn't have been nearly as popular if Half-Life hadn't been delayed by over a year.
When I was about 15, I drove my bicycle at high speed into a parked van because I was daydreaming and nearly broke my leg. It never would have happened if the van had been parked there. If the library had been closed, I wouldn't have been daydreaming in the first place, etc. The blame for my accident must therefore be shared among myself, the owner of the van, the library, the manufacturer of my bicycle, my parents, and the city.
Oh wait, no, that doesn't make any sense.
You're right, it doesn't make sense. Here's where the analogy breaks down: Was the van illegally parked in a hazardous place? (Ie, double-parked in a bike lane on a busy street). The library thing doesn't even come close to matching the situation mentioned by the original poster.
I hate the various laws covering IP recently, but the difference with your analogy is that these laws were passed to combat illegal activity.
You may have disabled Java, but most likely you didn't have Javascript disabled, which is what that page used. It was tricky getting the preferences pane up and onto another desktop, but the instant that I disabled javascript, the hijinx stopped.
Hmmmm... if the newest of the 2.4.x kernels doesn't fix this problem for you, then I suggest sending mail to the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Even if they can't fix it directly (and there are still some people working on the 2.0.x from time to time, so improvements to 2.4.x shouldn't be too unlikely), they may still be able to offer more concrete suggestions and ideas for what could be going wrong.
Thanks for your comments; I very much appreciate yours, and those of the other helpful people who showed up in and amongst the weenies who claimed such a problem was impossible.
Yes well.. those of us with enough experience in the field know that nothing is impossible. ;)
Wouldn't Slashdot be so much better like that? Then we wouldn't have to skim the comments of some boob nitpicking the editors for trying to produce non-cardboard prose.
But that's not what the introduction is supposed to be for on Slashdot. It's supposed to tittilate and engage the reader, leap out and shout "this is for you!" whether it really is or not. It's marketing.
Something very similar to this has been tested in court. Several years ago, mp3.com had a service to let you download mp3s of albums you owned.. ie, you put your CD into the drive and it verifies you have the album.. then you can download mp3s of the work. Well, at the end of the court fight, mp3.com lost a large judgement because even though the users of the service were downloading mp3s of albums they owned, mp3.com still did not have the legal authority to distribute the mp3 files. Only the copyright holder can have that legal authority.
So, if someone wanted to "download a copy so they could archive the original," the only ones legally allowed to give it to them would be the media companies, and don't expect that to happen anytime soon. While you might have the legal right to make a backup copy if you can, the media companies hate that "fair use" and are only going to make doing that as hard as they can.
1. hilight with mouse to copy selection
2. middle click target to paste to... (both buttons on a 2-button mouse)
Except of course when it does absolutely nothing, like it often does with, say, Firefox, Mozilla, and other GUI apps. Things seem to blow away the cut buffer so easily without any user interaction. So often it happens that I highlight something in an xterm, try to paste it in the address bar in firefox. Well. It doesn't paste. Try to paste it in another xterm, doesn't paste there either. The paste buffer is mysteriously empty. That's the sort of thing that people complain about when they mention cut&paste.
It... almost sounds like a large process is eating up a lot of memory, forcing other processes out to swap, and then dying, leaving those processes in a swapped state.. then other processes used the disk to generate the cache. That's what the symptoms sound like, unless you really are hitting some obscure kernel bug somehow. It sounds really odd. I do recommend trying the latest 2.4 kernels.
We've had this problem ever since RH9 came out
Aah, we upgraded straight from RedHat 7.1 (albeit a heavily modified and upgraded 7.1.. had XFree86 4.1, kernel 2.4.24) to Fedora Core 2.
It complicates:
# the ability to understand what is on you computer
How? rpm -qa will tell me all the packages installed. There are various frontends that are nicer to deal with as well. When I look in /usr, everything is laid out in a way that (usually!) makes sense.
# the ability to control what is on your computer
That's very vague. Exactly what do you mean with "control?" I've found I've had far more control with a packaging system than I ever really wanted...
# the ability to remove what is on your computer
Use rpm -e pkgname
# the ability to free up space on your computer
See above.
# the ability to recognize things that shouldn't be on your computer (spyware, viruses, etc.)
Eh? Spyware/viruses usually aren't located in C:\Program Files\Viruses under Windows (the platform with spyware/virus problems).
# locating programs (e.g., no icon on desktop or entry in menu, but you know files are installed somewhere)
Use rpm -ql pkgname. Or look in /usr/bin, since every binary ought to be installed there. Or run locate programname.
# troubleshooting program problems (e.g., missing files, corrupt files)
Use rpm -V pkgname to check this sortof thing out.
Back in the day, I liked when Windows 3.1 apps were just unzipped to an app directory. You could move that directory around, zip it, unzip it after reformatting the disk.. but that was the last version to feature anything like this. With win95 came the practice of flinging files around the around the filesystem. Under Linux I at least have a reasonably easy way to determine exactly what package owns a file, or if the file is owned by no package at all.
Audio is not terribly difficult to get working.. if all you do is plug a set of speakers to the line out of your video card. But under the amazingly user-hostile ALSA system, options like "allow AC3 passthrough" and "take all analog signals and send them to the digital out" for my SB Live! are notoriously difficult. The former problem was fixed by upgrading ALSA (apparently the SB Live support in the version included with the recent 2.6 kernels is BROKEN), the latter used to work and has stopped working for.. well, no reason really. That's how it goes with sound in Linux these days -- very easy to do very simple things, excruciatingly difficult to do non-simple things.
Bush is smarter than you, me, and a majority of the people on slashdot. I detest the man, but playing into the dummy stereotype seriously misunderestimates him.
As for the SATs I don't know if that's true [I try not to think about them unless I'm ranting] but even if it's true it doesn't mean they're intelligent.
It usually does mean they're intelligent, though intelligence doesn't always translate into real-world success.
And on top of all that, fuck them [not literally that's a crime].
Not anymore!
millions of dollars per movie/appearance? Let's see how "shiny" they are when their annual income is say more inline with reality, say $50,000/yr or so.
Sour grapes. The Olson twins fill a demand that not that many others could, and that's why they get paid the large salary. That's why most people with large salaries get what they do, from football players to actors to CEOs, because the work they do is in a lucrative industry and requires special skills or talents (natural or developed) that few people have. It's simply another example of the laws of supply and demand. You may think the work they do is worthless, but a lot of other people don't and are willing to plunk their money down for them.
And given the success of the Olson twins' recent endeavors (and their "advancing age"), I'd say their salaries are about to plummit. The only asset they had was their cute youth.